Tim Berners-Lee
I suppose it's amazing when you think how many things people get involved in that don't work.
I think when you have a lot of jumbled up ideas they come together slowly over a period of several years.
I don't know whether machine translation will eventually get good enough to allow us to browse people's websites in different languages so you can see how they live in different countries.
I'm an optimist about humanity in general, I suppose.
I'm very aware there are lots of other people who are just bright and working just as hard, with just the same dedication to make the world a good place.
It was really hard explaining the Web before people just got used to it because they didn't even have words like click and jump and page.
It's difficult to imagine the power that you're going to have when so many different sorts of data are available.
If you are not on the web, you will have problems accessing services.
I have built a moat around myself, along with ways over that moat so that people can ask questions.
What I do has to be a function of what I can do, not a function of what people ask me to do.
When you go onto the internet, if you really rummage around randomly then how do you hope to find something of any of value?
My own personal preference is that the consumer, the individual person should be protected because individual people and the difference between individual people and the diversity we have between people on the planet is so important.
One of the issues of social networking silos is that they have the data and I don't.
It's interesting that people throughout the existence of the web have been concerned about monopolies.
I should be able to pick which applications I use for managing my life, I should be able to pick which content I look at, and I should be able to pick which device I use, which company I use for supplying my internet, and I'd like those to be independent choices.
One of the things I like about the computer that I use is that I can write a program on it or I can download a program on to it and run it. That's kind of important to me, and that's also kind of important to the whole future of the internet... obviously a closed platform is a serious brake on innovation.
One way to think about the magnitude of the changes to come is to think about how you went about your business before powerful Web search engines. You probably wouldn't have imagined that a world of answers would be available to you in under a second. The next set of advances will have an different effect, but similar in magnitude.
In many ways, people growing up with the Web and now the Semantic Web take the power at their fingertips for granted.
The people who designed the tools that make the Net run had their own ideas for the future.
It's amazing how quickly people on the internet can pick something up, but it's also amazing how quickly they can drop it.
The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people.Collection: People
The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.Collection: Goal
When you understand things, there's no more magic.Collection: Magic
The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.Collection: Essentials
The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect - to help people work together - and not as a technical toy.Collection: People
It's time to recognise the internet as a basic human right. That means guaranteeing affordable access for all, ensuring internet packets are delivered without commercial or political discrimination, and protecting the privacy and freedom of web users regardless of where they live.Collection: Freedom
The more you enter, the more you become locked in. Your social-networking site becomes a central platform - a closed silo of content, and one that does not give you full control over your information in it. The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space.Collection: Space
I think, in general, it's clear that most bad things come from misunderstanding, and communication is generally the way to resolve misunderstandings - and the Web's a form of communications - so it generally should be good.Collection: Communication
If different cultures connect with each other, they are less likely to want to shoot each other.Collection: Different
The search button on the browser no longer provides an objective search, but a commercial one.Collection: Buttons
I invented the web just because I needed it really because it was so frustrating that it didn't exit.Collection: Exit
There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.Collection: Cells
If I had taken a proprietary control of the Web, then it would never have taken off. People only committed their time to it because they knew it was open, shared: that they could help decide what would happen to it next.. and I wouldn't be raking off 10%!Collection: Taken
To be a hacker - when I use the term - is somebody who is creative and does wonderful things.Collection: Creative
Universality has been the key enabler of innovation on the Web and will continue to be so in the future.Collection: Keys
Web applications will become more and more ubiquitous throughout our human environment, with walls, automobile dashboards, refrigerator doors all serving as displays giving us a window onto the Web.Collection: Wall
Software companies should take more responsibility for security holes, especially in browsers and e-mail clients. There are some straightforward things the industry should be doing right now to fix things, and I don't know why they haven't been done yet.Collection: Responsibility
It was the academic community who wired up their universities so it was put together by smart, well-meaning people who thought it was a good idea.Collection: Smart
The Web took off in all its glory because it was a royalty-free infrastructure . . . When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going to end in the U.S.A. If we had a situation in which the U.S. had serious flaws in its Net Neutrality, and Europe did have Net Neutrality, and I were trying to start a company, then I would be very tempted to move.Collection: Moving
There are converging web-related issues cropping up, like privacy and security, that we currently have no way of thinking about. Nobody has thought to look at how people and the web combine as a whole - until now.Collection: Thinking
Computers might not find the solutions to our problems, but they would be able to do the bulk of the legwork required, assist our human minds in intuitively finding ways through the maze.Collection: Mind
It's mine - you can't have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I'm getting in return.Collection: Use
It's possible to live without the Web. It's not possible to live without water. But if you've got water, then the difference between somebody who is connected to the Web and is part of the information society, and someone who (is not) is growing bigger and bigger.Collection: Differences
The nice thing about programming at the RDF level is that you can just say, I'll ask for all the books. You can ask for all the shelves. You can ask for a given shelf whether a book was on it. And you're not worrying so much about the underlying syntax.Collection: Nice
E-mail is interesting. We can't live with it, and you can't live without it.Collection: Interesting
What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web … Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring.Collection: Views
I think a lot of great software has been written by people who are scratching a short-term itch, something which has been niggling them for ages, but in the back of their mind they’ve got a wonderful long-term plan.Collection: Thinking
Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.Collection: Reading
[With AI] Somebody's going to have to think of a completely new algorithm, a new way of doing goal-based planning.Collection: Thinking